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ERICA CULLER: My name is Erica Culler. I am the school psychologist at West Branch, and we are going to be presenting to you on the entire process of PBS, so we wanted to give you a heads up that if you already

have tier one in place really well and you have tier two in place really well, this might not be the best presentation for you because we're kind of going from the very beginning. So if you already

have all that in place and you don't want to go backwards and listen to us, we will not be offended if you get up and find another presentation. But for those of you who stay, we have a lot

of really, I think, important detail of how we began implementation process and rolled out and all the changes we've made, and really would like to give some ideas to you about what we found to

be successful in terms of working with our students and teachers and the community overall. Okay, so as I said, I'm Erica Culler, the school psychologist. And with me today we have Cindy Etchison

our guidance counselor; Chris Marsh, one of our classroom teachers; and Holly Walker, our librarian and tier two coordinator. So we have a pretty big range of folks and ideas, so if you have questions

at the end, I think you can get a lot of really good perspectives. Maybe, okay. To start off where we began in 2008-2009, which actually was my first year in the district, we started with the IU

and Dawn Moss is our IU person. Hi, Dawn. And she has been incredibly helpful in getting everything rolling for us. So we spent a series of meetings within our IU with other local school districts

One of the elementary schools that was working along with us and going through with us had already kind of started all of their materials, and they were wonderful with sharing with us, which I highly

recommend. I think starting from scratch would be incredibly difficult and overwhelming because there are so many decisions that you have to make. So we really worked hard, following the lead of

the school who had already started and working with the other schools within our area who understood our demographics, understood our challenges in developing our vision and what we wanted to, I

guess, complete within the school-wide program. We came up with our school-wide expectations. And I know most of you can't see our board, but our expectations are to be safe, respectful, and ready

And then we created our behavior matrix, which I'm going to say was incredibly painful to start with. I think everyone, especially when you get into how do you want safe, respectful, and ready to

look in your classroom or in all classrooms, I should say, everyone has their own ideas. And one of the things that we found was really needing to simplify as much as possible. So if there's a rule

in your classroom about not chewing gum, but you know, maybe in another classroom that's considered an okay behavior, you can't put that on the behavior matrix. We really need to focus in on the

exact issues that you want to be addressed and then allow for some flexibility within classrooms to kind of add on some of those more specific details. But that's something, honestly, that we're

still hashing out is making sure that our rules within each area and all those expectations are adapting, we're adapting to our needs. So whatever you start off with you're going to need to change

at some point, and you need to know that from the beginning. So don't get stuck on one idea. We also then developed our initial lesson plans. And I'm going to say again too, those have changed. The

core group of people that you decide to have working on your tier one before you roll out to the rest of your faculty, yes, do the very best job you can, but be aware that whenever you get that information

out to the rest of your staff and your faculty members, they're going to think of things that you didn't. And you really, really need to be flexible, okay. The last thing we did over that summer

was work on our presentation to deliver to the school personnel at the start of the academic year, which, again, was an interesting experience for us which I will talk about in a moment. Okay. For

our rollout, we were very, very excited. We had our cards for our everyday reinforcement. You know, oh, I caught you doing a great job following the rules, here's a card for you. We were really

excited about that. We were incredibly excited with Mrs. Etchison really did an awesome job of putting together prizes at the end of the week for a drawing and really making them something that the

kids would be excited about. A lot of the things were, you know, extra recess, being able to spend time, have lunch with, a faculty member, being able to be an office helper or school photographer

So those sorts of things that don't necessarily cost a lot of money, but are still really rewarding for elementary kids especially. We also did a student of the day. So when they put their

tickets into the little boxes at the end of the week, we pulled one out randomly. It switched between each box so that one week it would be extra recess, the next week it would be school photographer

to pick our student of the day. We found that to be an issue. Oftentimes if you have a kid that you're targeting so you're trying to give them more reinforcement and giving them more caught you

following the rules cards, but they're not really demonstrating the overall behavior that you want all of your students to model and you pull that kid out of the box for student of the day, teachers

get a little upset about that. So we found that that really wasn't effective, but one of the things that we really felt strongly about was whatever we put in place at the beginning of the year, we

wanted to give it the whole year to figure out what was going right and what wasn't so that we could really, really dig down and figure out where those changes need to be made. Mrs. Etchison also

did a certificate assembly at the half-year mark and the end-of-year mark. And they tied in with Mrs. Walker's accelerated reader presentations which was really, really nice because the kids were

used to that format where whoever had, you know, the high number of AR points would get a plaque. And then at the same time, as they were in there and used to that setup and they knew what those

expectations were, Mrs. Etchison handed out certificates for students that had no office referrals for the year, which was really neat. It was really fun to see the kids come onstage who can't get

as many AR points because they are struggling with academics. They aren't going to be called on the stage for having the highest science grade every year, but by showing them that they can be rewarded

and be in front of the entire school because they're able to follow directives and not get office referrals, they were very excited about it. The other thing we started our first year, and I think

that this is crucial and it's been an incredible help for us, is our PTO support. How many of you have active PTO programs within your schools? Okay, great. Tap into those immediately. I think that

the more -- especially when you're coming out with a new program like this, you know, if you're talking about the new reading program or the new math curriculum, some parents are going to be excited

some are not going to be involved whatsoever. But when you're talking about behaviors and their kids getting rewarded or their kids having to earn extra rewards, that's when parents get upset. Well

this kid got to go on a trip and my kid didn't. Why? And I think that if you really get your PTO involved, explain to them what you're doing and get their support, then that information gets out

in the community and knowing that it's not that, oh, my kid didn't get rewarded, they are targeting him, but really having community members be able to explain what the process is and why it's been

beneficial. In addition to that, they gave us some financial support, which really got us started, you know. And one of the biggest problems with our PBS program is with everything else we're

doing right now in schools, there's no funding. So really tapping into those PTO members who do fundraising, who have community ties with businesses that can partner with you, those things are really

really important. And we've -- we'll mention that, our PTO support, a few times. It's been incredible. Okay, oh, did I miss something? Okay, about partway through our first year of implementation

we were really excited, we were really proud of ourselves, and we worked with our IU to implement tier two about six months into implementation. Don't do that. It was really nice. We kind of did

it as a pilot program. We really only worked with about eight kids, which was definitely the number to start with if you're piloting. But we didn't even make it the whole way through a full year

of good implementation with our tier one and we were already trying to help out our tier two -- our kids that would be on tier two. And again, it's because we had such a wonderful staff and such

excitement within the building to be able to meet these kids' needs that we kind of jumpstarted a little bit. But I think that we could've probably done it a little bit more efficiently had we waited

until we completed our first year universal-wide to figure out what made the most sense. But in January, we started training with tier two. And this is kind of where we had our team split. I

don't know about a lot of you, but when we started off with PBS, we essentially had an RtI team in the elementary school, and we weren't really sure how we wanted to make that look. So our RtI team

ended up being the same people that were doing PBS. I don't know -- how many of you have a PBS team and a RtI team? How many of you have all in one? Okay, that's going to be exhausting because, as

you know, I feel like the more you get into it and more you learn, RtI is this huge framework that covers so much, and PBS is a huge chunk of it. Even within the PBS structure, we're really having

to divide between universal PBS, tier two PBS, and even looking toward tier three PBS. So this is where we really started to split our teams apart to make sure that we could be the most efficient

And we wanted to allow as many people as possible be involved in PBS because it is so important and it affects all of our kids. Okay, and again, we had significant support from the IU, and one of

the nice things was at the end of the year, the IU held a luncheon type of thing for all the area teams because there were so many of us to get together and kind of debrief at the end of the year

And again, there's so many things that go on, it's not a canned curriculum. You're making choices, you're trying to decide what's best for the students in your building and how that's going to work

with those parents that being able to talk and network is going to make life a lot easier for you. So if you're just getting ready to start, look at the tables around you and get their contact information

and find out who you can bounce ideas off of. That's a huge, huge thing. Okay, speed bumps. We had quite a few speed bumps. The first part was timing. Really need to make sure that your administrators

I mean, when we started, our principal and our superintendent had to sign off that they supported PBS. And they did. They were very much supportive in terms of we think this is a great idea, have

a great time with it. And it's really been run by the teachers and by guidance and myself and really trying to put in all that work from our end. But at the same time, right before we decided to

do PBS, the current superintendent told the faculty that they were no longer allowed to take recess because of state mandates. So we took away their main consequence. And then we said, and by the

way, you have to do all of this. It was terrible, terrible timing. In addition to that, our first day of in-service, Power School, does anyone have Power School? All right, Power School, the

SAS curriculum mapper, and -- there wasn't the new reading program yet. Oh, it was -- I guess it was PBS. Those three things all in one day of in-service. Again, don't do that either. It was really

difficult. And so, you know, a couple of you raised your hands about RtI. Well, as the first year site -- as the first year in my position at West Branch, I went in ready to start with PBS. The first

time I was going to attend an in- service with everyone, I was told, I'm going to give you about five minutes, and I want you to explain what RtI is and how PBS ties into it. And then we'll spend

an hour on how the PBS program is going to work. Guesses on how that went? Anyone, yeah? It was really difficult, you know. We eventually just gave up talking about RtI because the discussion at

that point was just so overwhelming. So I think, again, timing is really important And because of that, because we didn't have that opportunity to talk about what RtI is, what is that framework

how does PBS fit into it, what are we talking to you about with these acronyms, the faculty had a really narrow view of the program, and that was a struggle. Systemically, again, it was only in the

elementary school. It was all at one time we had some issues. We also had a tracking system. SWIS users, does anyone use SWIS? Oh, sorry. SWIS I think is awesome, and I know that a lot of

people are really happy with it, and it provides some great data. What we found, though, is, with using SWIS, we had to have papers. We made up papers with graphs that the teachers had to document

behavior infractions, which then went to the front office and had to be input only by administrators. As you can see, our program is very, very heavily run by teaching staff. And so that didn't really

work well for us. So we really struggled throughout that first year with data collection, and when we handed the packets of papers to the teachers to say this is what we expect you to do to document

discipline, I think a couple of people had panic attacks just because it was so much more on top of them during that day of tracking. And Chris Marsh is going to talk to you a little bit more about

what we ended up doing in terms of the tracking system, but we'll get to that in a few minutes, but it was all this at once. It just really affected buy-in for us. It was a huge problem. I think

that people really understood that we needed to work with behaviors and that we needed to have really set expectations, but we weren't sure how to handle that. So what we ended up doing, I said

we split into tier one and two around January. I asked Mrs. Walker the librarian to be our main tier two person because she knows every student. She has been in that building for quite a while, so

she knew kindergarten through sixth grade, she knew their names, she knew their families. It's a small community. She had taught some of their parents. So having her really kind of oversee what was

going on there was huge for us. And when I went to her and said, what are we going to do about buy-in? I know that there are people that are interested, but there's so much going on, how do we make

this work? She had a brilliant idea. I just sat in at the Eichhorn Middle School talking with Dr. Sugai about their leadership team. And around that time, they were inviting IUs to bring

teams in to observe their school. And it was a phenomenal, phenomenal experience. But we didn't know who to take, and so Holly suggested that, you know, we really look at two incredibly strong leaders

within the elementary school that weren't quite onboard with PBS yet, and can we take them? Can we show them what this could look like if we really all worked together? And she identified Chris

and another teacher, and they went. And they came back and went, okay, I get it now. I see why we're doing this. And so you'll hear a lot about the leadership and the team makeup, but it's really

important that it's not just the same people who always do everything and, you know, people have expectations about why they're doing things, but really pulling from here are the teacher leaders

that can have an effect on what other people are seeing and what other people will do. And with a program as strong as this, just visiting a strong school, they'll immediately see what could happen

I did it again. No, okay. So what we're going to do now, Chris is going to talk to you a little bit about some of the restructuring that we did between our first year and our second year. CHRIS MARSH: Can

you hear me now? Everything all right? I am the cynical wasn't onboard guy, apparently, I find out now, on this program. Basically, here's what happened. I'm just a schlumpy fourth grade teacher

at the start of this thing. I'm doing my job and we have yet another meeting to roll out yet another thing, the 500th thing in two years that none of them are being mastered and everyone's screaming

about RtII and SAS and SWIS, and I thought, was is going on here? What is happening? We weren't on board, a lot of us, because you cannot explain in five minutes the concepts of RtII and PBS

and so conspiracy theories abound as to what this possibly was. Is this a way to keep kids from being diagnosed with special needs? Is this this? Is it that? We didn't know -- it was crazy. So I

know that Holly had said that I should go see this program with the other teacher because I am, A, cynical, which we found out; B, passionate; and C, brutally honest. And so if it wasn't good, I

was going to tell them, this is not good. Let's can this. So we went to a middle school down in Lewisburg and, you know, I was expecting the worst in my cynical nature. And I walked in, it

was like the Twilight Zone compared to the room -- or the school that I worked in at the time. And these middle school kids were just fantastic. They were doing great things, and there was no noise

there was no attacking and mauling each other in the halls, it wasn't -- you know, it was eye-opening. And so right away I thought, you know, how can we do this? And we didn't have, at the time, any

sort of state training. We didn't have, you know, we -- there was no place like this that we were going. It was just like, we want to do this, and when I saw it, I thought, oh, okay. I want to do

this too. And so when you come back and you have someone who was cynical but then is like, we can do this, it sort of brings people onboard. So one of the things when we were there that we decided

was we needed to take that first team that was in place and, you know, the RtII and this and that and the enthusiasm, we sort of moved them out and put the two of us that visited along with the

rest of the team in as the core team, and start that way. So we sort of rebooted after we went to visit this school. And one of the things we noticed about the school that we took back with us was

their technology piece of it. You know, she -- Erica talked about using SWIS data and whatever, and as a teacher I don't know about the SWIS necessarily, and I got a bunch of data things I'm looking

at. That wasn't one of them. So at the school we visited, they had something called TechnifyMySchool, which I'm going to take a second and possibly show you right now. This program was made

by the person at the school. Hold on just a second here, here we go. This was made by the guy at the school, and it just seemed to make sense. I'm fairly okay with tech, fairly tech savvy, but we

needed something that wasn't going to scare the pants off of all of our teachers who are not quite tech-inclined yet. And this was a very simple layout, very simple format that we looked out. I'm

going to take you through some of the tabs real quick up here. I can't show you anything with names on it, of course, but as you look at the first discipline overview page, you can see we have added

in -- we're working closely with this guy who created this program. We've added in our infractions, which change all the time. This is always a work in progress. Things always come, things always

go. We're always meeting about this, but the first page we just have everything listed so that we can see what's going on. And if we have something we want to do, we call our tech guy down

there who created this program. He's now taking this idea out of the school and taking it on the road, I guess, so to say. And we say, hey, John, how can we get this piece in? How can we get that

piece in? So we're building this program essentially to meet our needs. And that's a pretty good thing. And again, a work in progress. So the first page is the discipline overview. It's important

to say that when we got this, one of the things that we made a focus about doing was not having the teachers come in the first day of school and saying, hey, put your stuff in, put your information

in. They would have lost their minds, and I don't really blame them. So what we did was we met over the summer, this core team, and we entered in all their names, all their student names, all the

infraction, we did this for them. Oh, sorry. So we entered in all the stuff for them so that when they came in, all they had to do was sit down and receive a very easy here's how you navigate this

type of training. And that's proves to be very effective at our school with the tech -- the less tech savvy people. So on the administrators, teachers, and staff, we have everybody at our

school listed as per title. I'm logged in under Dr. Culler now, so we can see the full dashboard of options on our particular program that we use. I'm not going to show you students, even though

you already saw them. Wrote their names down, you're going to break confidentiality, I'm sure. But we track a lot of the data. These sessions you've been hearing about, you know, they're talking

about where are things occur, and we track that same type of thing through this program. You can see we have our auditorium, our bus, all the things you've been hearing about all the last couple

of days. When it's happening, we can track all that: before school, during the reading block, because we have a new reading program, we had to add that in. We have our infraction levels that are

going to look exactly like what you just saw in the first page. We have started to add in parental emails into this for parents who have email capability, and where we're at there are some that

don't. But some parents want to know exactly when something happens. They want to know the minute it happens. We found that out maybe a little bit the hard way. I mean, we were just going

about our business with blinders on, and these parents would call in and say, what do you mean my child got an infraction for the second time? I didn't know, you know. And so now we want to bring

them in through this program in email, so now when the infraction on a level three or four, like the serious ones, goes into the program, the parents get an email and they know exactly what happened

They can contact this email. It's virtually instantaneous, so that's worked very well. We have form letters we send home at certain points, as you saw on the first page I showed you. After four

see, we have consequences, potential consequences listed here. And so some of the ideas we've come up with that are effective in our school, you know, whether it's the lunch detention in with the

principal, restricted restroom time, after school detention. And again, it's a work in progress, what we add, what we take out of this. Okay. And here's how it's going to work. The teachers -- it's

this simple for the teachers. They have their login, they put in their name and their password, and this screen comes up. And it's just a bunch of drop- down lists. The date, they can select a student

which I'm not going to show you from the first bar. They put in whatever infraction level it is on the drop-down list. Okay, from that the next box of behaviors is automatically generated. If it's

a level one, we have all the level one infractions listed they can choose from. If it's level two, that changes into the level two infractions. We use our initial levels one and two for just tracking

They're called infractions, but they're not really something the kids do wrong. They're things that we might want to monitor, okay. So let's say we're concerned with hygiene, for instance

and in the classroom you noticed there's a child looks particular unkempt that day and that's what you noticed in the morning. And here's where you type notes. And if you're using this program, you

got to be really careful because you don't want to type your stinking child is on my freaking nerves, because when this get printed out and the form letter goes home, your stinking child, we don't

want to do that. Okay, that was one of the main areas of training with the teachers. Be careful what you say. You know, be tactful. Be careful, this is going home. And once it's in there, it's a

little difficult to change. But then they hit save and this infraction, if it's a level three or four, is sent to the behavior person for the student, which is generally the homeroom teacher

And then one of the administrators, maybe more than one of the administrators, to track, okay. And that's basically TechnifyMySchool and how we use that. And again, if you're data-driven like we

were talking about the last couple of days, data, data, data, we have things, again, a work in progress, things that we want to do. Infractions per month we can see by time, by location, by level

And we get the generated bar graph if we click on the handheld lens there. And let me get that centered for you so you can see it a little bit better, okay. And you can see -- you can change

the year because we have been tracking this for a couple years now. We've been using this system for a couple years. You can see the bar graphs. You can see first thing in the morning there are a

lot of level twos, a lot of concern levels when the kids first come in. I think that's going to be pretty natural. In the afternoon, after lunch, the SP is for specials, when they go to specials

You know, sometimes in gym class they get a little rambunctious or whatever, but we track that data, and we can look at a bunch of different data results that way, which the team then uses at intervention

meetings and things like that. So that was one of the main things we took back from our visit, our school visit. And how do I get this from current slide? All right, so that was our restructuring

where we got a new team in place. We did the faculty training, the teachers came in, everything's ready to go, bada bing, bada boom. Here's your name, first initial, last name, and whatever password

we give them. And it's that simple. Hit a couple of drop-down lists. That was -- that made people feel very good, very at ease. And at that time, we also extended our list of infractions and organized

them and brought the entire staff at an in-service and haggled out where they should go and what should be here and what should be there. And that sort of had that buy-in component then for

our staff, which was a really fantastic thing. And we have open meetings where, you know, if you want to come, you got a concern, come on, show up. If you have an idea about rewards, come on, show

up. We have teachers name their student of the day for every so often. We've got that down to a science where an email comes out from the secretary, hey, I need your student of the day for this

month or whatever, bang, we send it right back. And then that goes -- winds up going in the handbook. So I want to take a break now and give it back to Erica. ERICA CULLER: All right, one of the

things that I wanted to mention about Technify too, for those of you in the special ed realm of things, I was hounding him for a little while and he finally was able to build an Excel sheet for

us in the discipline tracking system. So it immediately for the year sends out by student name, grade, homeroom, level of infraction, the actual behavior, and the important part here, the consequence

So those of you in special ed that know you have to send in reports about how many of your special ed students had ISS, OSS, et cetera, there's an Excel sheet that is right there for you, which

I think is huge. And my special ed secretary was really excited about that. And as Chris said, this restructure for us, for last year, was really important. We're still going to go through

and change all of these things as we see fit, whether it's the infractions, the reward systems, whatever it may be, but really looking at the student of the day. As I said earlier, we went from we're

just going to draw a name out of the box to every teacher has the opportunity, a few times a year, to determine who in their classroom can be the student of the day. So it's not necessarily the

kids who are constantly up there, you know, going above and beyond and getting the WOW Cards all the time, it's oftentimes that child who is sitting in the middle of the room, being quiet, following

the rules, but they're getting that chance to be recognized, which is really, really important. The other thing we did was devise staff and parent handbooks. Those are what -- we have them

on the website, so I really highly recommend checking them out if you have a chance. The parent handbook is basically just the PBS section that we included in the overall handbook that goes home

But the staff handbook has everything from our behavior matrix to our lesson plans to how the structures work going from being at the universal level to being targeted for two tier -- tier two interventions

et cetera, so I highly recommend looking at those. Okay. Oh, we skipped your graph. Okay, other changes we made for last year. Again, always be ready to change things. We'd had them originally

as caught you following the rules cards. Our kindergarten children really struggled with saying that entire phrase, especially our kindergarten students with speech and language issues. So we decided

to make it a little more efficient, and so we've really run with the theme Watching Outstanding Warriors, so now they receive WOW cards. Some of the kids still struggle. I have parents that come

in and say, oh, my little Johnny was so excited he got a wild card. Well, no, but I'm glad he's excited about it. Again, the student of the day nominations. And then we really tried to add

on to the rewards structure, so instead of just having those daily cards and the weekly drawings, we wanted to look at semester rewards. If you can go through the entire marking period or the entire

month, so we start with monthly rewards, if you can go the entire month with no level twos, threes, or fours -- threes and fours are office referrals, level twos were classroom-based infractions

If you could go through the month, you could have -- be involved in getting, I don't know, extra recess, watch a movie, something like that. But we really wanted to do something special. So in the

winter, after almost the first two marking periods, students that didn't have any twos, threes, or fours, we took them on a bowling trip. And it was phenomenal. We had PTO, again, paid for our buses

And we bused all the kids in shifts over to the next town over to go to the bowling alley. And I'm going to tell you, the teachers were a little nervous at first. But they got there and then they

realized, oh wait, we brought all the kids that don't get in trouble. The teachers had an amazing time, the kids had an amazing time. The owner of the bowling alley sent our district a letter thanking

us for taking those kids and talking about how all the employees there were so excited to have such a positive experience with the students in our district. And again, it's because you're

taking those kids that know how to behave and can put those expectations across settings and generalize that from their classroom into the bowling alley and did a wonderful job. It was really, really

fun. At the end of the year, then, [inaudible] is a park in our area. And we did the same sort of thing where we load up all the kids who, for the second half of the year, had no level twos, threes

or fours, and basically spent the day divided into doing lots of different activities at the outdoor park. Again, really, really fun time. However, what about those kids that weren't able

to go? We had quite a few parents that were fine with it. They said my kid did not earn this, my kid -- they totally understood that it wasn't a second punishment. It was if you can earn this, you

get something extra. But we had a lot of parents at the same time who felt like you're punishing my kid twice. They got an infraction, they got a detention, and now you're keeping them going on

this trip. And that was a really big struggle for us. We actually had a couple parents call the state PBS coordinator, who contacted our IU, who contacted us. Yeah, so we tried really hard to figure

out how to work around that. You know, we went through parent education. We tried to talk to them about like the idea of this being a reward system. But ultimately some of those parents still

struggled with that. And so we, again, at the end of the year, we did two of these cycles because, again, even after the bowling trip, the parents of the children who weren't eligible to go were

very upset. But we weren't going to make any changes until the following year because it's just -- we need to go through the whole process. So what we ended up doing, and I think that it worked

out really well, level twos are minor classroom behavior problems. Should you really be punished extra for talking in class? Okay, so what we decided to do is for this year, threes and fours, those

office referrals, are the eligibility criteria, but also instead of taking these huge two times a year trips outside of the building, we started doing, by marking period, incentives within the building

So therefore more kids were included and it happened more often and it didn't seem like as a big of a deal for the kids that missed it. But it's still a big enough deal that they're kind of upset

when they don't get to go and it encourages them for the next time around. So, again, that's one of those things where you really have to take into mind what is your community like? What

is your school like? How can you make that work so that you are maximizing the reward while minimizing the amount of feedback you're going to get from parents whose kids aren't eligible? Another

area that we had concerns of, and I think I skipped over this earlier, with special education, what do we do with special education with those kids who are emotionally behavioral disorder kids? And

I think that that was something that we really had to work out and talk very specifically with as you do in all cases with kids in special education. How's it going to work for that kid? Are you

automatically going to hammer them with an office referral the first time that they run down the hallway, or are you going to go back and reteach? Because ultimately, this is what we're looking

for. The whole goal of this is not to punish these children, it is to stop, reteach, model, and have them go on. And so I think that was a really big conceptual piece for us to kind of understand

is these kids who are identified with disabilities, whether they're special education students or they're students with 504 agreements, you know, that have the disabilities but don't necessarily

need specialized instruction, how do we make sure that we're modeling and reteaching instead of just hammering them constantly with consequences? Oh yeah, and I think that we've actually gotten really

good at that. And part of that too is our guidance counselor is very familiar with students with disabilities, especially what we see often in schools with behaviors, kids on the autism spectrum

kids who have been diagnosed with ADHD, and the teachers are incredibly comfortable going to her and saying, what should I do about the situation? And again, it's that constant collaboration and

communication between everyone in the building that makes this work so well for us. Last year, we also implemented teacher rewards. I think that when you're looking at this program, it is intense

There's a lot to think about. And so in the middle of class when you're trying to, you know, teach three-digit by three-digit division with regrouping, do you really need to focus on whether that

kid is sitting quietly in his seat? It's hard. So what we will try to do is kind of motivate the teachers to focus more on that. And so we instituted teacher rewards. So essentially when we

pull the names out of the box for who won the weekly rewards, we read the student who got the reward, Johnny Smith won school photographer awarded by Mrs. Walker. So it's really fun that way because

we can recognize those teacher. And then at the very end of the drawing for the students, we pull out a card and if Mrs. Walker gave Johnny a card, it would be the teacher winner of the week is Mrs

Walker awarded by Johnny. And then Mrs. Walker would get, you know, a movie pass, a [inaudible] gift card, something like that to really help encourage the teachers to be involved and so that they

know what that reinforcement is like too. You know, if you're in your classrooms and you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, how often do you see your building administrators? So you need

rewarded, you need reinforcement that what you're doing is worthwhile, and so we really wanted to play into that. We also took some advice for input for prizes. There were teachers who were

kind of developing prizes that they wanted to do. And so it was really important for us to survey the kids. Mrs. Etchison took care of that. She put together a form for the kids to really talk about

what they wanted, and so we've started to really implement those this year. So we did -- was it the water bottles for the Wii? The Wii game? We got a Wii for collecting -- oh, that's part of it

I'm sorry, I was really excited about it, so I brought it up. So we have video games incorporated that Cindy will tell you about later. We're doing, at the end of this marking period, an activity

day for the quarterly reward that's going to have a dance DJ by Chris Marsh over here. Zumba and quiet reading time because some of those kids, they don't want to be surrounded in the middle of a

kickball game, they just want to be able to go into the library, pull up a beanbag, and have some quiet during their day. So those are a lot of things that we really did. PTO again on this

slide, they are phenomenal. They have a carnival day every year that all kids go to. It's not based on whether you have office referrals. Snow cone machine, popcorn machine, games, balloon animals

last year, I believe. But in addition to that, they bought t-shirts for every one of our elementary kids that said Watching Outstanding Warriors, West Branch Elementary, to really kind of tie everyone

in together, so that was really cool. Okay, as I mentioned earlier, with our infraction levels, it was really kind of tough to figure out how we wanted to handle this. Our classroom-based consequences

parents got really upset when they were, you know, given -- we're giving their kids a detention for talking out in class. And we agreed with that. And so what we did was we made those notifications

and the consequences, the office-based consequences, that go with the level threes and fours only specific to level threes and fours. But what that meant was we weren't getting the generated letters

for level twos. And we had parents that still really wanted to know because we started off sharing that with them, they really wanted to be kept in the loop. So we created, again, on the website

these level two sheets so that if you get a level two classroom-based infraction, we as faculty write their name, there's a check sheet for which level two behavior they -- you know, whether they

were talking in the hall or passing notes, you just give a little check mark. It gets sent home and it has to come back in signed. If it doesn't come back in signed, we call home. We make that contact

so that the parents are aware. We've found that, again, these parents, once they found out that we are doing things, they want to be involved and they want to know what their children are doing

which is really exciting. With that parent involvement, so as I said, when we took our field trips, parents were very upset about punishing their children twice. So what we ended up doing was having

a parent meeting. We had no idea how it was going to go because we implemented -- or we had the parent meeting after we implemented. I do not suggest that. As I mentioned, talk to PTO, have a parent

meeting explaining the process that you're going to be doing for the year at the beginning, before you start anything. Because after we had our parent meeting and we really tried to go back and

re-explain what was probably different from what their children told them, most of the parents were okay with what we were doing. We had a lot more parents come onboard with us, so I highly recommend

talking to them first. What we did this year to plan for that, because there are parents that were excited, we've had three or four parent meetings that we scheduled right up against PTO, PBS

at 5:30, PTO at 6:30, again, to make sure there are more parents there because they're already coming, and really talk about an entire session devoted to tier one, an entire session devoted to tier

two, an entire session looking forward to what do we want to do with tier three? And you're going to find that the more sessions you hold, the fewer parents are going to come because once they've

realized that you have their child best interests at heart and you're trying to improve their behaviors and you are really concerned about them and their functioning, they don't want to come anymore

They trust you, which is really nice. The other thing that we really paid attention to last year was funding. PTO continued to give us money. They do a lot of fundraising throughout the year

When we had rewards and prizes that we wanted to pay for, they were incredible. In addition to that, you need to look at what your local funding sources are like. Our special ed director contacted

Wal-Mart. It was a long process with a lot of paperwork, but they ended up sending us $1000, a check for $1000 from Wal-Mart that we could use for whatever we wanted to for our behavior program

So really look into what you have available to you. Okay, last year our big excitement was after two years of implementation, we were recognized at this conference for being a banner school for

fidelity of implementation. We as a faculty, we're very, very excited. We, just like the rest of you, have had a lot thrown at us in the last few years, and we were expected to do more with less

But having someone come in and say, you know what, I know it's hard, but look what you guys are doing, look how these kids are responding, great job, we were really, really excited about. CINDY ETCHISON: She

didn't break it. All right, let's see if I can get this taken care of. So our timeline for this current school year, we had some changes. And one thing that I remember, when I got my principal certification

I had a great educator. And one of the things he taught us was when you get your first administrative position, the first year, don't change anything but your underwear. So kind of remember that

when you start PBS. Don't change anything. Eric has already said that, but don't change anything that first year except for your underwear because otherwise you're going to have three parents that

make the most noise coming in, trying to encourage you to change something that's not going to be beneficial for the whole. And so go through those growing pains and kind of just suck it up

and do the best that you can with it that first year. Now something else that I'm going to mention that hasn't been mentioned yet was we were really tough cookies that first year. That first year

seriously, if you forgot your library book, too bad, you don't go bowling. If, you know, if you forgot a homework assignment, too bad, you know, you don't get to do the end-of-year. And that's probably

why these poor parents -- and we weren't expecting children to be perfect because we did give verbal warnings ahead of time. We weren't just nailing kids every time they forgot a homework assignment

We did do verbal reminders. However, we needed to remind ourselves that -- and I said this to many of the children, I would have never gone bowling in elementary school with those expectations. I

wouldn't have made it to the trip to the park. I knew that. And so we lightened up a little bit, and instead of making it anyone who had a level two, three, or four infraction didn't earn

and we had to use that word and I highly encourage you to constantly use the word earn, because especially parents will say, you know, this double jeopardy, they got nailed for this, and they got

in trouble for that, and this is what's happening. And I use the example if I'm speeding down the highway and I had a couple of speeding tickets, yeah, I'm going to get a ticket and I might get points

taken off of my license, and I might have my insurance go up. So sometimes there's more than one consequence for a behavior, and we try to teach kids that early. And so that's why you want to use

the word earn. When parents say, huh, now they lost their reward for the month! They didn't lose something that they didn't get, okay. I don't get an extra bonus on my insurance because of something

I have to earn getting a discount off of my insurance after proving that I can go for so long without a speeding ticket. And so use the word earn regularly. So our kickoff actually for this current

school year, the first day or two of the school I did a visual presentation for first through sixth graders. Kindergarten was not invited because PBS was brand new to them. But all of our kiddos

knew be safe, be respectful, be ready. And so there are a couple of the colored forms out there. I did a PowerPoint presentation, and the first week of school you should be doing -- the first or

two of school you should be doing your lessons for each area of the school. You do a lesson at a playground, what's expected at the playground. You do a lesson on the bus. I always did the

lesson for assemblies, so I pulled an assembly together with our first through sixth grade kiddos, and they all came in to the all-purpose room, they didn't have chairs, they sat on the floor. And

I did a PBS lesson -- well, I did the PBS new things for the school year. And I needed to see just how well they remembered our assembly expectations. This was an amazing reinforcement of everything

that we did. Yes, we've had summer in between, our kids came in. When I said, voices, it got quiet throughout the room. And as I kept pushing the button to tell kids the changes for the year and

the new things and the extra prizes they'd be earning, they were excited, but well under control. Their behaviors were exemplary. And I continually rewarded them and verbally praised them for those

things because they did an amazing job. And so I knew that the lessons that we continued to do the year before were carrying through. And there's nothing better for an educator to know, guess

what? I'm getting a brand new group of kids this year, but they already know they have to be safe, they have to respectful, they have to be ready. Having those in place year after year is a great

thing for the classroom teacher and for everyone in the school because there's that -- I said, children want to know our expectations just like we do. You ever drive down the highway where there's

not -- the speed limit isn't posted? And it's a new highway for you and you're like, how fast am I allowed to go here? We want to know what our limits are, and so do children. So going in that next

school year having - - knowing exactly their expectations was a great thing. So this is actually what I did is I did the PowerPoint presentation. And it was probably about 12 pages long. And then

I compiled it into four pages, made copies for all the classroom teachers, all the rooms in the school, and those four changes were posted everywhere in the school so the kiddos could see them. So

for this first year, we had student of the day before, but now their name was put on the front of the school every single day on a big piece of blue paper. So now we took those names and we created

a bulletin board in the middle of the school. So all year long, if they were student of the day, and you -- nobody could get student of the day more than once. So we have a chance for 180 children

to be student of the day. That's a lot of prizes for free. And kids would walk into the building to look to see if their name was there, and they were very excited. And then to see that name was

now put on a bulletin board that's there all year, great deal. Instead of earning two WOW days a year, which was the bowling the year before and it was the park the year before, we were doing it

quarterly now this year. So for those kiddos that maybe messed up the first month of school, if they kind of held it together for that second grouping of the -- for the second quarter, then they

could earn that special thing. And this year it happened to be -- well, I'll mention it later, but some special assemblies. Last -- the year before, if you had a level two, forget it. Too

bad, so sad. When I told the kids only kids that got levels threes and fours would not be able to earn the quarterly reward, woo! We were so excited because there were kids, seriously, that only

had like a couple level two infractions a year before. Now it was a goal within reach. And so I think that made a huge deal. And when we're seeing, you know, we have about 575 kiddos in the school

we're seeing 520 kids at the first assembly, awesome. And I don't know if this was mentioned or not, so if you don't earn those special things, if you don't earn your monthly reward, if you don't

earn your quarterly reward, you're not punished. You just have a day like every other day. You have a couple hours that maybe the special events going on, one teacher in each grade level stays behind

for that handful of kiddos that didn't earn. And so if they usually have math during that time, we'll have math. If you usually have reading during that time, we'll do reading. So we're not punishing

them, we're not laying on extra work for them, it's just a continuation of the typical day. Oh, and I also mentioned to them that rewards will be taking place at the school instead of going on a

bus somewhere. Real quick, then I mentioned about the blue letters, because the blue letters were new this year. And that was that communication piece. And I'm always saying that whenever there's

a problem between two children, or of children and their parents, or parents and the school, it's usually because of lack of communication or poor communication. And I'm teaching this to kids at

a young age, and that's what the blue letters were for. And I made sure these kiddos knew that if you got a blue letter, it was not meaning that you couldn't earn something. And that was huge too

In fact, many times I'd have a kiddo all bummed out, and I'd be like, what's going on? I can't go to my -- and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's go look at the posted letter, you know, the posted

pictures that we have, let's read through it. Yeah, you got the blue letter, that's just letting momma know -- mom and dad know what's going on. You still are currently on your process of earning

your monthly reward. So we noticed that our very first year, our most frequent infraction at the level two was homework, missed homework assignments. And we had repeat offenders, repeat, repeat

repeats. And it was hard for us to determine, and it's hard to determine, we think every homework assignment's important, but everyone forgets every once in a while, everyone has stuff going on

in their life, so we tried to lighten it up a little bit. Somebody was saying, yeah, they should be able to miss, you know, six homework assignments a quarter. That's 24 homework assignments a year

That's just a little too much. And so we had to come up with something that we could all compromise on. So we turned them -- we had them level twos, but remember, with level two infractions

you still have an opportunity to earn all your privileges. However, after three documented missed assignments, we're now contacting mom and dad to say, your kid has not been doing their homework

and there's a problem. And that contact could be by phone, it could be by email, it could be -- and you know what, I don't know about you, but I have a lot of parents, they have a cell phone, but

you can't even call them on their cell phone. And so the texting. I mean, we have to find creative ways to contact our parents. And I don't know about any of your districts, but our district, we

have parents who change their cell phone number every six weeks or whenever one plan runs out or whenever one whatever, and so keeping that communication is so important. Our children do not know

their phone numbers anymore. We used to -- that was one of the first things you learned when you were in first grade. You don't even know your phone numbers anymore. So keeping that communication

and texting, emailing, the blue letters, whatever it takes to contact parents is really important. So after we had six missed homework assignments, it's starting to get to be too much. So we say

to the teachers, you can now assign them to homework club. And it got pretty quiet in the auditorium or in the place where I was giving whatever. Homework club? What's homework club? And we usually

we have the same -- pretty much same offenders as the ones the previous years. And we've decreased the frequency of how many times they miss homework and we're trying to create better habits for

them, but it's really hard. There's some kiddos that it's just when the day is over, the day is over. And so that's where the homework club came in. We had two teachers that were very ,very gracious

to say they can be in our room, they were learning support teachers, and so these kids would be assigned homework club, and they had to go to homework club for two consecutive weeks and not have

missed homework assignments before they could get out of homework club. Now if a student would continue to miss homework, another -- yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm sorry to interrupt you. I just wondered

I just wonder what your levels are. What is a level two for your school? Is that a district policy level violation? CINDY ETCHISON: No, we create -- first of all, we created the levels, and Chris

did mention that on the TechnifyMySchool. So I -- can we just wait until we're kind of done with our presentation to discuss it more? But we created the levels and we created the severity levels

of, you know, level one were mostly issues of concern like if a child cries a lot or if they're having hygiene issues. Those are just like personal issue concerns. And typically I would get that

information if it happened more than a couple of times because I'm thinking, what's going on? What can I do to help this kiddo? There's something unusual. Level twos the first year were no-nos, but

we lightened up a little bit and so -- and we can go back to the TechnifyMySchool to show you what we created for those different levels. And I know there had been times when something new comes

up and if we can't figure out where to put it, we have the administration, there's some of us on the team that can get into the system and add the infraction ourself. We don't have to contact the

person that developed it. Okay, true. And level two were classroom-based and also the classroom teacher takes care of it. A level three and a level four, like level four, we're talking out of school

suspension. Not even -- you know, that's all there is to it. And level threes are physical aggression and repeated offenses of certain things. And so the level three and the level four were always

then referred to the office, which was a principal issue, and there were higher consequences for. Okay, so our level -- then so if a student missed 12 homework assignments then, it's no longer a

level two, they skip it up to the level three. Now you don't have the opportunity to earn your quarterly reward. You don't have an opportunity to earn your monthly reward, that kind of thing. So

then I actually went through with the kiddos and reminded them what they could earn. And so they could earn the student of the day, about -- we give out about 100 cards a day with our staff. We have

free recess for the students and their classes, which is a really great gift. Number one, it's free. Number two, one child's good behavior could earn the entire class something extra. And that's

how it is in life, isn't it? Sometimes we get along on the coat sleeve of somebody else because we happen to benefit over somebody else. And it's a really nice thing too because the kids are really

looked fondly upon. All right, yeah, he earned us, you know, free recess! And so they get a lot of positive peer interaction because of that. Student photographer is a huge very, very likeable

reward. It costs us about $5 a week. We get a nice camera. Who's ever chosen, they get to use a digital camera for the day. They're to take 15 plus pictures and then I go and get them developed

and then they're put on a bulletin board. And then the kids get to keep them when the bulletin board is taken down. And then everything's digital, so then the PTO and whoever does yearbook also

has a ton of pictures that the children have taken. So that's a really good one. Okay, so these are the lists of our school store voucher, free computer time, mystery prize, gift giveaway, and the

staff, which Erica already talked about. Then we have something called a super prize, and the super prize is handed out every two weeks. And five kiddos win and a friend. So now we've -- we see kids

in there that don't earn WOW cards and it's hard for them to earn too many things because of repeated offenders, but they go into something really special and when they go in there, they enjoy it

so much that they work hard to try to earn those kind of things themselves. So with that, we have Sunday Monday. We have a picnic lunch, which is really neat, the kids pack their own picnic lunch

and choose their menu. We have a pizza lunch from a local restaurant. They donated the pizza for our four or five times this year. And then we had something called fine dining, which is a lot work

but the kids really love it. It's in a classroom, you use cloth, tablecloths. You have china, you have stemware, you know, crystal stemware. And they just get their school lunch and they bring it

in, they put it on the china and the lights are turned down. And you have candles lit and we have soft music on a CD player. Seriously, it's the biggest deal in the world. They're eating off of china

It's a long way from McDonald's and they don't always get that at home. So we -- and it's funny because anyone could win, so we might have kindergarteners sitting down with sixth graders, and it's

a really cool thing. We have our monthly rewards we talked about. And then at the very end of the presentation, it was everyone can earn these things. Remember, it's up to you to be safe, be respectful

be ready. So we talked about that. We have student of the day buttons now. We have tip of the cap for staff members that staff members can either get an extra 15 minutes at lunch or else they can

get, oh, a snack out of the teachers' lounge for free. So we try to do things just to reward them. Okay, we already talked about the homework club, the things in green were things that I talked

about. One thing we were worried about parents saying, huh, but my kid always eats breakfast at school. We worked with the cafeteria ladies for a grab-and-go breakfast, you know, a milk and piece

of fruit or something that they could just carry. They'd go pick it up, go to the room to work on their homework during the homework club. We talked about the different meetings that we've had for

parents. It's very interesting. Whenever we had the first meeting to talk about tier one for our -- at our PTO meeting, we had a big show up of parents. Wow, we want to know what's going on with

this thing, rah, rah, rah. And so they just did the presentation, I did the PowerPoint for it. And I was out of town, so they did the PowerPoint presentations for tier three at our last PTO meeting

for the year. And we had one parent show up. I hate saying it, but that's not necessarily a bad sign. When you have a lot of parents show up, it's not usually the ones that are all hunky dory and

all thrilled to death of everything that you're doing. So we had one person coming finding out, well, wow, what's level three all about? We know level one, we know tier one, we know tier two. What's

going on with tier three? So that -- it might appear -- again, you can look at everything is the cup half full or the cup half empty? That actually wasn't a bad thing. Our funding this year

our PTO did a great job again, giving us $500. Then they gave us box tops for education the first round of collections, which was a little over $1,100 or $1,200. And then we had a paddle auction

which generated over $1,500 for our program. And it was -- the community was invited to come and I got to introduce the program, so I was telling people what PBS was. And these people were like

oh, what's PBS? You know, what's the fundraiser for? We anticipate it to be a yearly event, and I'm sure that it's going to generate a lot more funding. And real quick about funding, I'm going to

say the only thing that our district had to pay for with PBS was substitutes when we had to sit down and do some work. Everything else was either donated to us by local people, community members

parents, PTO. So yes, this is not something that would break your bank if you're creative. So next year actually, we will be starting in -- well, we actually -- bus issues, cafeteria issues, unstructured

time, a lot of problems. So during that time, we have tried to come up with some creative ways to -- some creative ways to actually encourage kids to behave and make better choices. So on the bus

this isn't on here. So on the bus, we got triplicate WOW cards to give the bus drivers so they would get to keep one of them to take home, one goes into a regular prize drawing, and then we, just

a couple of months ago, created another box and it has a bus on it, and it's a different color. You put the pink slip in that box. One name is drawn every three weeks or four weeks, and that child

gets a certificate to go to the movies with a popcorn and a soda. And that's to encourage good behavior on the bus. So you have to creative with those things. So we're going to be doing more

bus and cafeteria issues. When we have changes or things to update, we'll send out papers for the kids to give to their parents to put into their handbooks. We now -- we're going to be having a

dustpan award for cleanliness in the classrooms. We're going to use -- we have a tray that was spray painted gold, the gold lunch tray award for the school -- for the classroom that's doing the best

in the cafeteria for the week. So we're coming up with ideas, and I know we've gotten a lot of great ideas just being here. And then we're also going to be hoping to have biweekly tribal council

meetings where the kids are involved and the review of counseling topics. Oh my gosh, and you're tier two. So sorry. HOLLY WALKER: I know you like to talk. CINDY ETCHISON: Not that much. HOLLY WALKER: Okay

now, not having done this before, and I guess I'm going to stand up here even though I'm used to be in among the classroom, being above you guys is a little strange. All right, I kind of thought

I might need to have my walker because I've been around so long. Anyway, yeah, I'm doing tier two. We, as you can see, call it the POWWOW Program, Partnering Our Warriors With Outstanding Warriors

There's our triangle that everyone is quite used to. I'm in charge of the yellow chunk. You've all seen this plenty. Okay, tier one -- oh, wait a minute. We're concentrating on tier two at this

point. It is for the early interventions for some of your 10-15% of your students who aren't getting it in the universal. They're the at- risk, they're the ones that are still goofing around even

though they know what the school rules are. Not to be typical, but -- and it's not all boys. It's kind of like the bad kids club, but it's a good thing. It really is. How can you get into POWWOW

Teacher referrals, parent referrals, because that has happened. I have kids that come and ask me, Mrs. Walker, I want one of those sheets. I want a POWWOW person. That's pretty cool. You've got kids

that want to go talk to a teacher at the beginning of the day and want to go talk to a teacher at the end of the day to talk about their day. One of the reasons why most of these kids are

in POWWOW is there's not a whole lot of support at home. Okay, so we have about 25 kids right now, or during this school year. We have many staff. As you can see, we have about 18 staff members

that are being POWWOW people. That's kind of nice because it's not all bogged down to one person. I seem to be the substitute person. Whenever anybody is absent, the kids come to me. Centrally located

I have all of them, they know me, and that works. I don't know that that would work in every school, so give that some thought. We have had a number of students graduate and that is what's

cool. And they are already watching themselves. They don't need their check-in and check-out paper. And I know that earlier, in some of the seminars they were talking about check-in and check-out

and check and connect. We not only have our kids come and check-in with just the numbers and everything, we actually have conversations with them, so. Okay, so POWWOW is definitely an extra

support to give them reinforcement for what did you do good today. It is a daily thing. And as you can see, it just reinforces the positive things. It is a positive attention for these kids. They

may not have that anywhere else in their day, at home or in school. It is definitely a way of successfully making a good change in these kids. I've seen it quite a bit. They check in at the

beginning of the day, they carry their tracking form to all their classes. We switch for reading, we switch to go to specials. They bring their POWWOW paper, and they're supposed to hand it to the

teacher when they go in. They don't always. I've got some kids, I've got these sixth graders that have it stuck in their back pocket. That's okay because as long as they get it out of that back pocket

We have some kids that it works best that it be in a binder, and they have to carry these bulky binder so they remember to take it with them. Whatever works for each individual child is what we're

trying to do. Okay, so how was your day? What did you do in this class? It -- was it a two? Was it a -- were you ready? Were you respectful when you were talking back to me? These are the things

that the teacher does to fill in their little circles of their rating. And then at the end of the day, they -- the student goes back to their POWWOW buddy, and they go, yeah, I had a really good

reading class today. I was on-task. The teacher even told me that. Or, what do you mean you weren't ready? I thought we talked about this. Well, I forgot my pencil. You know, it's one of those deals

They know what they did. Okay, they come to us, their POWWOW buddy, between 8:15 and 8:45. Our announcements are at about 8:35 so we kind of tried to give them a timeframe. We even started announcing

it so that it was a reminder. Hey people, get to where you need to be. It's a positive greeting. It might be the only positive they have first thing in the morning because who knows what it was

like at their house when they were getting ready to get out the door and on the bus. Do you have your gym clothes? Did you bring your library book today? Usually we try to remind them the night

before. Was anything going on at home? You know, did you get breakfast? Are you sure you -- you know, a lot of times, a lot of the POWWOW buddies have some breakfast bars just in case the

kid didn't go to breakfast and they didn't have any at home. Because we all know that if they have something to eat in the morning, then their day is going to be a little bit better, but that's just

a personal thing that some of us do. We follow up on what's gone on before, what are we going to do make it a better day? Each week, they get a new form. It's five days so that the whole tracking

for the week is on one sheet of paper. Okay, so during the day, as I said before, the students gets to check in, like have a discussion with their teacher just quick. It's like a minute long unless

it needs to be longer because of consequences. The teacher can tell the student what they did right, what they did wrong, what we can work on, it's really quick. The student also takes it to the

cafeteria, the cafeteria monitor. I'll have to admit, it's usually fine unless they've acted out. Usually you don't get much of a lunch report unless something major happened, and then we all know

about it. But it does go with them there. At the end of the day, at the checkout, you know, it's another positive sincere greeting. The buddy will be encouraging about what the day was like

You discuss with them, okay, so maybe you weren't on-task during this time. What could you do tomorrow that'll be better? Hey, what are you doing fun tonight? You have any plans? Do you have your

homework in your backpack? Side note, we've had this parent that's been kind of thorn in our side. Not my kid! My kid's perfect! What are you talking about kind of person, we've all got them

So she wanted us, the POWWOW buddy, to make sure that all of her student's -- or her child's homework assignments were in the backpack. That is not really what the POWWOW buddy is for. It's kind

of like a surrogate parent, but really the child needs to learn to have that responsibility. And having that extra push with a POWWOW buddy is the support that we're giving them. Then the next -- oh

yeah, they leave this form with their buddy, the student leaves the form with their buddy so that it doesn't get lost at home. Okay, then they come in the next morning to pick up their form and once

again it starts all over. We have had a number of parents that are interested enough to want to know exactly what their student has done. So at the end of the week, we send it to the office, make

a copy of it for the student to take home. Because a lot of the teachers will write notes as well as filling in the little circles of one, two, or three. Okay, so my responsibilities are setting

up meetings. And since I know all the students and I work with all the teachers, I often will introduce students to whoever the POWWOW buddy is going to be if they haven't selected them already

Sometimes our elementary kids get to choose who their buddy is going to be. I will also make sure that they know how to get to that classroom if it's somebody different. We sent parent letters home

We collect and summarize all of the data. Our school secretary puts it in, then we meet every other week. Yep, got it. Okay, there's an agreement signed. We provide a lot of positive feedback. I

talk to the teachers that have students. I talk to the buddy a lot. And, of course, I talk to this team a whole lot. Okay, that you can you read for yourself, moving right along. We do contact parents

so that they are aware of what's going on with their children. And as I said before about sending the progress home with the students at the end of the week, we are their cheerleaders. We want to

get -- tell them, just do your best and that will be a good thing. It is designed to be positive. I agree, I slipped back with a couple of kids. We got this one kiddo who's quite the bad boy and

I got so frustrated with him. I've talked to you a hundred times! Why are you not behaving yourself! I don't know. I'm too cool for words. You know, so anyway, because it's just so hard to

not -- so anyway, so it's positive interactions, trying to reteach and refocus. It's a way to communicate back and forth from home. It definitely has helped create a safer environment for the kids

and definitely students knowing that there's somebody there for them. Wow, yeah, there we go. That negative comment, yeah. We encourage the parents. I've had a number of parents come in and

say to me, thank you. You know what that feels like? It's pretty cool. Additional tier two interventions, we have Mrs. Etchison doing counseling and social groups and lunch groups and peer meeting

mediating. She does individual counseling with them and parent meetings. Actually, do you want to talk about this or can I? CINDY ETCHISON: Real quick. You can just hold on to everything. You know

actually a lot of times I -- kids will come to me after they're finally getting it together and they'll say, but my parents fight or my parents are doing this or my parents are having a problem

I'll come in in the evenings if it makes it work for them to come in and sit down with them. I have six years of mental health background, and I've worked as a therapist. And so I have had parents

come in for two hours and it's almost like an initial counseling class for them. And then I encourage them to get help outside, and this has happened many times. And so parents are receptive to some

interventions if you have the resources to tell them where to go to get some help. So I think those are really important, and we're going to just keep going on here real quick. So we -- this is

yours? So this is our banner school year for the second year in a row, and we're very excited about that because it worked -- we worked very hard for that. And if everybody who contributed to that

were standing on this stage, we would -- it would be overflowing because our entire staff is amazing that helps with this. And so this is not something that just a few people do. This is not your

typical PTO meeting. This is something that the entire school does. We have tier three, the final frontier, and we have not done that yet. We're just now starting that this coming school

year. For those kiddos that just aren't getting it with the tier one and tier two, we are out there searching for additional interventions to help these kids and figure out what might make them tick

and help them be successful. We kind of feel like we only have a little bit of time with these kiddos because then we ship them up to the junior high middle school, high school, and they have alternative

ed once they leave our school if they don't get their act together. And that is not where we want to place kids. So we're trying to find creative ways to help these students and oftentimes pull

these parents in. So we have -- it's to get more intense services and interventions for these kids. And you know who they are. And they're -- they are, they're that small population of kids, and

it's that small population of kiddos that exhaust you, that takes out all your energy. And so the sooner you try to help get them to where they need to get, actually the more relaxing it is for

you and for the rest of the students. So we just need to come up with a really highly effective system in identifying those students. We need to provide goals for rapid access and for individualized

support. We need to create interventions. And we need to find some pro-social behaviors. We need to change their behavior. We need to figure out whatever behavior's happening, what can we do to modify

or change that behavior? And we have to find the ways to actually monitor that. So one of those is being -- we'll be creating a lot more behavior plans. And we've done that in the past, but

we need behavior plans that address the setting events, like what causes that behavior, what's happening right beforehand. And we need to teach short-term acceptable replacement and desirable replacement

behaviors. And then we need to recognize the child for exhibiting that new behavior. We need to praise them. And trust me, we have seen some of these kiddos that will get a WOW card once every three

months. If I see them carrying a card, I make a song, I make a dance, and I make a big deal about it. And one kiddo recently, he was bringing one in and putting it in one of our prize boxes

I said, how did you earn that? And he's like, well, I found it in my desk. I said, hey, you earned it sometime. I'm thrilled that it's in there. Good job for you. Not even 24 hours later, this same

fifth grade boy was walking down the hall with his class. He saw me, he stopped me, and he said, look. And he showed me that he had a WOW card. I said, are you serious? How did you get that? And

he's like, I was being really helpful in the classroom. He blushed. Huge thing. So to me, I was excited. It was worth my song and it was worth my dance to see that he worked hard. Just so you know

three days later he had in-school suspension. However, he still had a 24-hour period of time that he was working good and hard. Okay, Chris. So sorry. Hold onto it. CHRIS MARSH: Okay, real quick

For the people who are dealing with a little bit older kids, we're -- let's see, I went from cynical and inflexible to now I'm getting my principal's papers, so that's the combo from hell. And I

stepped up to do the middle school thing. We're trying to take it from alternative ed to put a program in middle school. And if you're working with older kids, this really -- what we're talking about

at the elementary level translates pretty easily the same way. We have tried it once before. It got the kibosh put on for one reason or another from the 12th, 11th grade area because they were like

how does this work? It's an elementary program. So being stubborn like we are, we went right back at them in the middle school. And this year, we're now trying to get that in place to start next

year. So you do the same things. It doesn't change the process. We reviewed where we were at, we put in a course for the future, we're going to do something a little more grown up like an

economy system of rewards for the cards. We basically just mature the concept for the older kids in the middle school. And again, they're going to have lessons. We reviewed those lessons, we reviewed

the infractions, fixed them all up as necessary, came up with those core rules for the middle school, and we're right now working on that rewards system that's going to be rolled out. And what we

know is going to happen is, starting next year, the middle school, six, seven, and eight are going to do this, and it's going to be successful because we have a great team in place from all different

content areas. And then those ones that put the kibosh on it before are going to say, oh, I guess this is appropriate for us, and that's sort of where we're going with the middle school concept at

this point. ERICA CULLER: Okay, I know we don't have much time left, but if there is overflow, we're happy to stick around and answer any questions, but any questions, comments, at this point? Oh

yeah. There's a lot of information on our website, West Branch Area School District. What is it? No, westbranch.org. I don't even know. My email address is eculler@westbranch.org. As a school psychologist

I don't have a classroom full of kids to try to manage while emails are coming in, so you're welcome to contact me. I'm also our coach. A lot of resources on the PaTTAN website for the conference

here. Anything you are interested in that we have created we will happily send your way. But yeah, if you have any questions, we'll stick around. PRESENTER: Thank you so much